Connor V.
@ConnorVO
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Building investing tools and newsletters -- Prev: Growth PM @ Rec Room, PM @ Zynga.
Joined July 2015
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Pinned Tweet
Social proof is one of the most powerful features in social products and yet is massively under-utilized by almost all social platforms.
Let’s explore some ways that Twitter successfully uses social proof and some ways they fall very short
Thread👇🧵
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Let me tell you about my favorite app growth strategy of all time. The app launched almost 4 years ago, was purchased and shut down 3.5 years ago, and yet I still bring it up almost weekly.
That app was "tbh" which was built by
@nikitabier
and team.
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My old boss at Zynga and I recently raised some money from some awesome investors to build a new social stock investing app built around communities.
We are hiring iOS/full-stack devs and designers! Please send your favorite folks our way :) (DMs are open).
RTs appreciated!
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@Matt_Levine_1
He says he has “no idea” how this happened, someone points out that the board had to have signed all of these equity grants, and then he says there was a “growth plan (we) trusted that didn’t pan out”.
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@GavinSBaker
What does running well mean? The site (that hasn’t shipped anything) just didn’t collapse? I don’t think that’s the point of having employees.
Are CEOs that are convinced by Elon to start cutting weak CEOs? Would a strong CEO have known to cut many months ago?
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@Aazarshad
@ShaanVP
*Dont necessarily agree with Shaan, but* Clubhouse is literally people’s Twitter graphs ported over to a separate app. But now you can just do it on Twitter.
Snapchat was always fundamentally different use case and relationship than FB/Insta (much more 1:1 chat v broadcasting)
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@patrick_oshag
Non-tech:
- Gymshark + Influencers
- Machinima + Machinima Respawn (small YTers want to be hired by Machinima to create for the main channel, but could submit videos to Machinima Respawn channel)
- Lyft Mustaches
- Hydroflasks (still not sure how they built their brand)
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@patrick_oshag
- TBHs high school launch strat
- FB only allowing high school kids in if a college kid invited them
- AirBnB cross posts to Craigslist
- Mailbox did the first viral waitlist
- PayPal’s two-sided referrals
- “sent with Hotmail”
- Instagram’s “come for tool, stay for network”
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Poparazzi (
@poparazzidotcom
) launched today and skyrocketed to the top of the App Store because of their 500k (!!) person waitlist.
One of the more clever social apps in a long while.
My initial thoughts and a quick app deconstruct 👇🧵
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@Matt_Levine_1
Yeah, I think that’s the correct take. It’s just PR spin. Just the whole “he is not here because he has risen” thing + this is all the old CEOs fault is quite aggressive with some obvious holes
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@GrimCrumbs
@Snowflake458
@HoratioLewis1
@AttorneyCrump
@BenCrumpLaw
You think it is okay to chase down a guy at gunpoint because you think he may have done something wrong? You, my friend, have a severe misunderstanding of our laws and constitution
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@maxkolysh
@dhh
Taylor commented about the Away CEO IG post and Balaji came out of nowhere to “try to protect a victim”. Taylor didn’t start it with Balaji. And this “victim” that he is protecting is the CEO of a billion dollar company that has been fired twice for abusive behavior to employees
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People you should follow (and their badges):
@blakeir
- creators/gaming (🎮)
@shaanvp
- business ideas (💡)
@packym
- company deep dives (📝)
@patrick_oshag
- breaking down businesses (👨🏫)
@sahilbloom
- finance threads (🧵)
@ruima
- Chinese companies (🇨🇳)
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@nikitabier
This is like asking if there were any examples of successful iPhone developers before the iPhone was invented
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7/ Growth
They purposely gated growth by being invite only and slowly rolling out high school to high school so that they had time to collect feedback and ensure they had PMF before scaling. It took them 6 weeks to hit
#1
on the charts and 8 weeks to get bought by FB.
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4/ Receiving an Invite
When you received an invitation, they wouldn’t link you to the app. They would link you to a website that acted as a landing page so they could basically say “<Person A>, <Person B>, and 12 others from your school are on tbh. You should install it too”
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5/ Viral Loop
- Invite a friend
- They click on the invite and go to a landing page with social proof
- They install the app
- You (the inviter) now appear in polls for this new user
I don’t think SnapKit was available yet, but it is incredible for this flow.
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2/ Finding Friends
When you signed up, you would select your high school and give permissions to access your contacts. Then they would suggest friends in this order:
- Contacts (Number of shared phone numbers then alphabetical)
- Friends of Friends
- Same School
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I'm sure I got some details wrong, but the general principals are awesome.
Follow
@nikitabier
for memes and great product content (and maybe new startups in the future since his FB vest is almost up ??).
Follow me (
@ConnorVO
) for no memes and worse product content
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@GavinSBaker
(not a statement on whether or not the Twitter turnaround will be successful, but one month seems like way too short to declare it a winner)
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Why are Coinbase’s fees so high? I paid hundreds of dollars to sell BTC on Coinbase. Can’t you trade crypto for free (or near free) on many other platforms?
No wonder their revenue is so high, but that seems very unsustainable
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1/ What was tbh
tbh was an anonymous polling app for high schoolers (though I’m guessing
@nikitabier
would say it was a dating app). It was bought by FB for ~$30M in 2 months. My team at Zynga tried to both buy and copy them. Neither worked lol.
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@alexandr_wang
SF Bay Area never had (and still doesn’t have) the best talent in the world. 99% of the world’s best talent exists outside of SF, we just have never had (and still don’t really have) great ways to find and work with those people
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Theory: there will be 0 successful web3 games that market themselves as P2E. Once the goal for users is to make money, it becomes impossible to build a sustainable economy.
For a web3 game to be successful, it has to be a fun game that some people happen to make money from.
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3/ Inviting Friends
They would also give you 30 invites to share with your contact list. They ordered your contact list like so:
- Number of other people in the app that also have this phone number in their contacts
- Alphabetically
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6/ First Users
They created a private Instagram profile for a school in Georgia (“tbh @ <high school>”) and followed students from that school. These students followed them back. Then at 4pm one day, they made the profile public so that all those students got a notification.
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Solana has been entering the mainstream so I read, watched, and listened to every piece of Solana content I could find and created this Notion doc that contains the best resources for fully understanding Solana.
Some highlights in the thread below
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@fahdananta
Every industry dashboard ever looks the same. There are only a few revenue streams and the dashboard shows those. Doesn’t seem particularly suspect
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Duoyin, the “TikTok of China” is dope and
@patriciamou_
and
@ruima
did an amazing deep dive on it. I’ve pulled out some of my favorite product takeaways and put them in a thread below
(Their article has pictures and prototypes. Read it)
🚀 Just dropped: our 1st Product Teardown on
@theChinaSpec
is on Douyin, aka
@tiktok_us
.
1/ Deep dive on:
- origin story & technical stack
- Douyin vs.
@tiktok_us
differences across: content, livestreaming, gamification, search, & monetization.
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@patrick_oshag
Buying stuff from China and selling on eBay/Amazon.
Half my “entrepreneurial friends” and I did this during high school/college
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Such a messy breakup at Flexport!
“I have no idea how this happened” -> someone points out the board was signing off on these equity grants -> “we trusted growth plan that didn’t pan out”
“75 hires with 1000 employees isn’t much so we missed it” -> “there was a hiring freeze”
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So many products force you to sign up before using their product at all.
Be more like TikTok. Let users watch all the videos they want without signing up. Then when they want to actively participate in the product, force them to sign up.
Your conversion will be much higher.
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Dive deeper into Solana by watching this FTX Interview where
@jackshaftoes
interviews
@aeyakovenko
(Solana CEO). They discuss Solana’s founding, Proof of History, how it will scale, and what projects he’d like to see built on Solana.
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One of my favorite growth strategies of all time is now illegal and got the manager that proposed it fired.
But it also got Visa its first 60,000 customers.
Quick Thread 👇🧵
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There are 3 different levels of social proof (ordered by importance):
Level 1) People you are friends with / follow
Level 2) Experts
Level 3) Big groups
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Random Thought:
- I wonder when we will see a Voodoo of casual social apps.
- Builders like
@nikitabier
,
@hunterjisaacson
, and
@thefuturematt
have built killer consumer social apps and are experts in the space. I bet one of them could build a Voodoo-like network
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@jasoncwarner
Hey all! A former GM at Zynga and I recently raised a round for our pre-launch social investing product and are looking for our first designer and a couple of full-stack/iOS devs. DMs open :)
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When
@shaanvp
talks about business ideas,
@packym
dissects a company,
@patrick_oshag
breaks down a complex topic/business,
@ruima
writes about China,
@sahilbloom
writes a thread on finance, or
@ljin18
discusses the creator economy, I listen (and you should follow them all).
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@Suhail
In crypto, the early adopters perpetually bounce to new projects where they can collect early adopter rewards thus making user acquisition and retention very expensive and causing the non-early adopters to eat the downside when the early adopters bounce to a new project
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@Bitdealer_
made this image showing the insane growth in Solana hackathon participation over the last 3 hackathons (first hackathon in February, second in April, third in May).
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@patrick_oshag
I know you like growth loops. This thread is my favorite that I don’t think I’ve shared with you
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@awilkinson
I don’t understand how playing phone tag is more efficient than just putting them on a calendar? What is actually the issue you are solving?
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@sweatystartup
Dude, for many people these things ARE their life. It’s not just a political or societal issue, it’s an issue that affects them personally. This is very much privileged white-dude take
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@blakeir
’s post the other day about Twitter’s lack of badges touched on this. In the world I come from (mobile games), we use badges and level systems for this exact reason: to display mastery.
I’ve always felt like Twitter could have done more with badges.
Create badges that are unlocked by achieving certain milestones. Encourage certain behavior on Twitter via badges.
Examples:
☎️ = Verified phone
💬 = Replies often
🦠 = Viral
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People you should follow (and their badges) cont:
@lijin18
- creator economy (🎥)
@samparr
- media biz (💻)
@austin_rief
- media biz (💻)
@nikitabier
- viral products (🦠)
@michaelbatnick
- investing (📈)
@juliey4
- investing (📈)
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The $SUSHI CTO publicly stating that working on building $SUSHI sucks and that he has no faith while also submitting a proposal to have all core team members paid $1M in coins that immediately vest is about exactly how I expect most “company” DAOs will go
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@_freshfolife10_
@GavinSBaker
Agreed. Seems like it shouldn't be a surprise to "strong CEOs" though
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However, back to Blake’s point, Twitter could do more by adding tags/badges to help me better understand Michael’s account.
Is he a sad, bald man commiserating on how unfair life has been to his hairline or a funny, bald guy with great insights on investing?
(It's the latter)
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Easily the coolest way to do Deep Dives I’ve ever seen. It has drawings, a tappable prototype of Duoyin, and fun animations (and the info is awesome).
(
@patrick_oshag
you will like)
🚀 Just dropped: our 1st Product Teardown on
@theChinaSpec
is on Douyin, aka
@tiktok_us
.
1/ Deep dive on:
- origin story & technical stack
- Douyin vs.
@tiktok_us
differences across: content, livestreaming, gamification, search, & monetization.
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Interesting question I heard.
Has a social app ever gained prominence without having a utility (I.e Instagram filters)?
A lot of the most recent social attempts have tried adding unique social components, but no new utility
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@mariogabriele
Nobody cares about decentralization. It’s why projects like Solana are so exciting. At least their value prop is something people care about (fast and cheap)
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@nikitabier
@theSamParr
Leasehackr is incredible and there are quite a few people on there who makes 6-figures just negotiating for other people (which shows that tons of people are ripped off). When I get a second car, I’m definitely using your strategy though.
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Would anyone that is fairly active in the stock market be willing to hop on a 15-minute video call for me to ask some questions about your investing process?
We are getting fairly close to having our alpha ready and would love to chat to some potential users :)
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@mhdempsey
Built something here (a natural language stock screener) and have seen a handful of "ChatGPT for finance" products and none have stuck so far.
Investors who regularly want this kind of structured data already know how to use screeners to find it (and the UX is just better).
I
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@kevinyien
One of the biggest mismatches I see in Product people between perceived talent and actual talent is someone who joined a post-PMF rocketship as employee 20-200
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If you like product tweets, you should probably give me a follow (
@connorvo
).
I have built a bunch of games/products used by millions of people and studied even more of them.
I am also building a pretty cool social investing product with an awesome team, so stay tuned :).
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Successfully onboarded our first user today.
Our growth is officially exponential. I don't make the rules
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The crypto world shows why shorting is so valuable.
In crypto, without shorting:
1) Valuations run rampant which incentivizes short term thinking meant solely to boost valuation in the short term which leads to lots of people losing money and fewer long-lasting companies
and…
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@patrick_oshag
The definitive rankings:
- Duolingo
- Snapchat (until about a year ago)
- HQ Trivia
- Stadium Live
- Zenly
- Powder (new but dope
@TurnerNovak
)
- Piñata Farms
Tribe and Houseparty were alright.
Some of the health apps are good too. Calm, Headspace, Lifesum, Aaptiv
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@gregisenberg
Aren’t there literally hundreds of thousands of thriving communities using Reddit/Discord/FB Groups?
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@patrick_oshag
Their massive advantage in gaming was that they were an ad network that moved into gaming which is opposite of most companies (gaming -> ads).
They knew what game types performed well in ads AND use their own ad network for UA which is cheaper.
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@Jason
@covercash
@coinbase
@brian_armstrong
His statement is not about politics. It’s him conflating “politics” with real world events affecting the everyday lives of people (mostly minorities). For these people, it’s not “politics”, it’s life and Brian gave them a big middle finger
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@aaronoleary
@cyantist
Yeah, at the very least, I would hold off on commenting on things that you haven’t really looked into, especially when they deal with potentially dangerous subjects
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There is no such thing as truth in war, just propaganda. This is Hamas propaganda.
Hamas is directly (failed rockets falling in Palestine) and indirectly (using civilians as human shields, preventing them from leaving, etc) responsible for Palestinian civilian deaths which they
A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7.
2K
4K
16K
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Social proof is essentially just using social data to help you inform your decision.
If User X on Twitter has a ton of followers, or someone you respect greatly follows User X, or 50 people you follow also follow User X, you will probably follow them.
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@chrlschrischris
@edbtzya7mar
@K1NGC4MERON
@nolimitchrizi
I think the strategy is not have 3 cops with their guns pulled doing nothing. Use tazers or tackle the guy if you don’t want him moving. They let him just walk around the car and did nothing
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@Victor_Patru
@vcstarterkit
What is the thought process in putting Chamath, whose firm has been a dumpster fire that everyone left, in the same bracket as Some of the greatest of all-time?
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@fahdananta
@theryanking
Just basic strategy would suggest that if you are trying to build something that will be used by most/all merchants on Shopify, that feature is already on Shopify’s roadmap.
Of course they are going to build features to help merchants
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@thesamparr
@NickThoughtRepo
I’ve always viewed swag more as a team morale thing. People just feel good and more like a team with some swag
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Twitter does this well on profiles by showing you how many people you follow also follow the account you are looking at.
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Follower count on Twitter defines mastery, but this is very limited.
It forces everyone to play the same game.
Whether you got your followers by buying them, being famous outside of Twitter, stealing memes from IG, or posting your own content, you are all measured the same.
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Little site to track which brokerages are allow/blocking which stocks. Let me know what I’m missing/have wrong
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How many neobanks can their possibly be? A new one raises money every 4 days and they all seem exactly the same
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Private market prices are SIGNIFICANTLY worse than public market right now. Discord raised at 3.5B and Epic at $17B. Both would be worth many multiples more in public market
Unity at $14B makes Epic Games at $17B look like a steal.
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@NewRiverInvest
Similar to the politician ETFs that launched a few weeks ago, these are nothing but a money grab based on (inaccurate) public belief that politicians are incredible traders (they aren’t) and Cramer is a terrible trader (he isn’t good, but he isn’t bad enough for an inverse etf)
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@hudsonjameson
@bitcoin4bernie
@Shizcrey
@furter_samuel
@DeanEigenmann
His website says he is founder and editor in chief
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@tylertringas
Is it typically people from within the industry building these products or has someone figured out a way to understand an unsexy industry well enough to build something for it without working in the industry first?
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Thank God random tech founders aren’t decision makers in government right now or WW3 would already be in full swing.
We probably shouldn’t be writing threads on things of this importance that we know nothing about
America should send air support, drones, or troops if needed.
Military supplies.
Aid.
And the murderers should be put behind bars, i.e. maximum sanctions for decades to come, as long as Putin is in office.
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@sarthakgh
The worst part is that the very initial point about Steph Korey’s behavior towards employees was far more important than the utterly useless drivel going on now. We need more convos about ethical workplace behavior from those in positions of power!
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Badges can be used to further distinguish between the "games" people are choosing to play.
As Blake mentioned, you may want to be known for viral threads (🦠🧵) or funny content (😂) or really smart tweets (🧠), but there is no way to get rewarded specifically for those games.
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